Richard Fairgray proudly labels himself as human garbage, who calls the filth that is Hollywood — or at least the lower part of it — his home. “Blind, gay and grumpy about both,” he has been making comics — over 250 of them — for a very long time. Here, he chats about his latest endeavor, Haunted Hill, a new webseries publishing weekly.
“Eva’s wife got a job she couldn’t turn down. Now back in Haunted Hill (the lowest part of Hollywood that can still claim “Hill” status), Eva must navigate feeling out of place—balancing exhaustion with the desire to be vibrant and adventurous. Haunted Hill circles the drain of a functional life, turning the simplest task into a hilarious ordeal.”
Who is Eva and what she means to you? Is she modelled after a particular person in your life?
Eva is my most infuriating best friend. She’s messy and always out of place and can’t read the room and always talks like she’s halfway through an apology when she realizes she’s actually right. She loves to think of herself as a good person, but time and time again there are little signs that she’s actually pretty inconsiderate, just kind of barreling through the world too busy looking for things she might get wrong to notice the ones she actually does. Eva is the kind of friend I have infinite time for. One of the things that makes me enjoy writing her so much is that she is simultaneously trying to be liked while also never adhering to what anyone else wants her to be, so she is this constant contradiction pulling herself in two directions and that turns every scene into either a conflict or a drama. There are elements of her based on myself and a lot of her charm comes from my friends Lily and Sara.
Everyone is familiar with the glossy images of Hollywood and its dark underbelly, but Haunted Hill seems to be a world entirely its own. What is it about Haunted Hill that made you decide to use it as the stage for your series?
I don’t think the images of Hollywood are right, or at least not complete. I think they are two parts of this incredibly vibrant and grimy place where status is transient. I’ve lived there on and off for 5 years and I’ve never felt more at home, but when I try and tell people about it they look at me like I’m describing Hell. I’m hoping that Haunted Hill will give people a more visceral experience of what my day-to-day looks like so that they can at least feel like they are along for the ride.
Tell us a bit about your creative process with this series. How does it differ from your previous work?
When I started drawing this I was signed on with different publishers for three ongoing series. I was delivering synopses and scripts and waiting on feedback and notes and trying to juggle all these ideas that were often months old by the time I started drawing them. I go completely off-kilter when I’m stuck with nothing to do so Haunted Hill was meant to be a project to bridge that gap. I write a 6-page chapter in the morning and draw it over the next 2 days, then I just repeat that until I am forced back to work on another book. I have vague ideas of where things are going with a larger story, but it’s designed to take place in pretty much real-time, so I think after the 12 issues I’ve finished I’m still only on the second day. I’m also cutting out all the parts of comic-making I don’t enjoy, so there’s pretty much no digital work involved at all. I draw it, color it with markers and scan it as a photograph so it gets the full richness of the original art.
Why do you love writing and making comics so much?
I’ve been writing and drawing since I was really young (first book at 3, first self-published comic at 7), and I think it’s a lot to do with my terrible eyesight. I can’t really see in 3 dimensions so translating the world to a flat surface has always felt like a way of understanding myself better. I also think comics are one of the most versatile mediums, it’s the only way I know that you can control time with detail, or create imaginary moments by just not showing them, it forces our brain to go back to being a kid when we had to interpret everything by filling in the gaps, rather than glossing over details to just grasp the big picture.
Read Haunted Hill and more of Fairgray’s archive of work at richardfairgray.com.
